Six Ideas for Batman's Movie Future

Originally Posted to Playeraffinity.com, August 25th, 2012

As it's been pointed out for the better part of a month now, there's plenty to admire (or more bluntly, slavishly fawn over) about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy. He not only proved that people will pay a ton of money to see summer movies that are more emotionally and intellectually stimulating than $250-million dollar versions of Rock 'em Sock 'em robots, but also showed that a reboot can be a reinvention instead of just a rehash. And perhaps best of all about The Dark Knight Rises, is that it brings his Batman trilogy to a definitive end, granting audiences closure as he and Christian Bale ride off into the sunset with no intention of even returning to Gotham...

...which is probably why some Warner Bros. exec is currently pulling his or her hair out trying to decide what to do next, since Nolan has burned down the franchise torch so close to the handle, whoever he passes it on to next is going to get burned. Where can Warner possibly go after the unparalleled success of The Dark Knight Trilogy? Is it time to hit the reset button and start from scratch, or see where the few threads left dangling may lead?

Here are a few different thoughts and angles to consider now that the prospect of making a great new Batman movie seems even more daunting than after the boondoggle that was Batman & Robin. First, let's explore the many possibilities of rebooting the Caped Crusader, then discuss the options for a slightly more direct sequel to the trilogy. And if you're one of the three people who hasn't seen "Rises" yet, prepare to have it spoiled.

The Reboot Route

Distance Yourself From The Nolan Films As Much As Possible: 

One of the biggest problems with Marc Webb's recent superhero reboot, The AmazingSpider-Man, is that it's aesthetically indistinguishable from Sam Raimi's original trilogy, and offers only slight changes in tone and characters to get us through the same origin story we've already seen. Having to watch two Batman origin movies in the same decade would suck, as would trying to make a reboot in the vein of The Dark Knight Trilogy. Whoever winds up following Nolan will inevitably be ill-equipped to recapture his kinetic, more realistic take on Batman, so no one should even try.

The best course of action will be to either take an approach that's either much lighter, or even darker. As for setting up the character, any reboot would be wise to alter the traditional story heavily, or skip over it altogether. Whoever doesn't know that Bruce Wayne's parents got shot when he was young, and that he has a thing for bats, probably doesn't care about Batman in the first place.

Follow Marvel's Lead: Fun First, Brand Building Second

Sure, a lot of The Dark Knight Rises' success at the box office is due to it offering a darker, more mature alternative to Marvel's breezy and more gratifying superhero flicks, but Batman's been goofy a heck of a lot longer than he's been moody. A return to Batman's campier, but more accessible roots would help give a new film its own identity, while also giving DC the opportunity to build towards something they've wanted for years: a "Justice League" movie.

Marvel launched the "Avengers" initiative with Iron Man because he's the most relatable and charismatic character in their roster; the same could be said of Batman for The Justice League. While next summer's Man of Steel is rumored to get the team-up ball rolling, early teasers make it appear nearly as grounded and serious as Batman Begins was, and the whole point of crossovers is that they're meant to be fun and exciting, something The Avengers did really well.

To wit, i'm going to say three words no one wants to hear: bring back Robin. It's really easy to hate The Boy Wonder, even Christian Bale said he wouldn't do a Batman movie if Robin was in it, but Batman having a sidekick makes him part of a team, which is what The Justice League is all about. A young companion helps to lighten the tone, and means Bruce Wayne's past doesn't have to be the main through line all over again.

Make The Darker Knight

It's hard to imagine a PG-13 rated superhero movie that's somehow bleaker than one in which love interests tend to die horribly and the hero's hometown does a six month LARP of Berlin circa 1945, but Batman's source material has some seriously grim alternate versions to draw from.

Take, for instance, Batman: Earth One, the newest comic to modernize Bruce Wayne's originsby reimagining the death of Martha and Thomas Wayne as political assassinations, and Gotham's police force as completely at the mercy of organized crime. Best change: prim and proper butler Alfred gets turned into a gun-toting S.A.S. badass, who trains Bruce in crime fighting, even though he should probably be the one out on the streets cracking skulls in the first place.

Or Warner could revive their original plans for the post-Schumacher era and use Darren Aronofsky's plan for a "Batman" that's part Se7en, part Dirty Harry. Instead of inheriting the Wayne estate, Bruce becomes a street rat under the care of an auto repairman named Big Al. For high-tech weaponry, Bruce has cobbled together junk, including an armoured Lincoln Continental straight out of Mad Max. While he slowly develops a secret identity that includes a hockey mask, Jim Gordon is a suicidal Serpico figure looking to violently end corruption in Gotham, and Selina Kyle is busy running a local cathouse. The latter option in particular would need something stronger than a PG-13, but a bump up in age rating is about the only way you'll out-dour Nolan.

The Sequel Route

Blake-man Begins

By conventional standards, the end of The Dark Knight Rises is about as sequel-ripe as you can get. With some instructions left by the presumed dead Bruce Wayne, hero cop John Blake finds the Batcave, and one can imagine Bruce also left a bunch of details on how to access all the hideout's special toys, and what day garbage is. Granted, it's unlikely that Blake is as well versed in martial arts as Bruce, but he's as determined to bring justice to Gotham as the original Batman, due process and civil rights be damned!

This leaves open a few options for Blake as the new protector of Gotham. John Blake does sound suspiciously like Tim Drake, a former Robin who started hanging out with the big boys once he ditched the red and green tights to form his own secret identity, Night Wing. Keeping on the name train, the reveal that Blake's full name includes "Robin" in it could mean that's the new identity in store for young John, although most superheroes will recommend coming up with an alias that doesn't actually contain parts of your real identity.

The obvious direction would be to have Blake go for the brass ring and become the next Batman. It'd be a clever way of acknowledging that the title can pass not just from actors, but from characters too. Plus, they could follow Grant Morrison's recent run of Batman & Robin comics where a (temporarily) dead Bruce Wayne is replaced under the cape and cowl by former Robin, Dick Grayson. The Robin shaped hole in the dynamic duo was then filled by Damian Wayne. Who's Damian you ask? Well to answer that, we should consider …

Talia Is Alive and Preggers

Here's what we know about Talia al Ghul: she's got serious ninja skills courtesy her father, Ra's, she and Bruce had an impromptu foyer fling (and considering Bruce's celibate streak, chances are the bat-condoms in his wallet were expired), and her death was about as convincing as Katie Holmes playing a district attorney. Unless we see a funeral, closing your eyes and slumping over doesn't cut it. During the climax of the movie, when everyone was busy watching Bruce re-enact his favorite scene from The Avengers, Talia could have easily slinked away somewhere safe to later discover she's going to have a Bat baby.

In the comics, Damian Wayne was the son Talia and Bruce, raised by the former to be about as nice as anyone could expect from a kid named Damian. But after some fast-tracked daddy issue resolution (i.e. Bruce dying), Damian settled down and became an official part of the Bat family, filling in Dick Grayson's shoes as Robin just as Grayson was filling in Batman's.

Imagine this then: Talia's shame at failing to fulfill Ra's plans for Gotham forces her into hiding, where she raises and trains Damian, preparing him for his legacy as the heir to both the League of Shadows, and Wayne Enterprises. With Bruce too busy completing his bucket list of countries to bone Catwoman in, a young Damian comes to Gotham to find the mysterious Batman his mother has told him so much about. When he finds John Blake instead of dear old dad, a more experienced, wiser John Blake takes Damian on as his ward, training a replacement that, like Bruce, has some serious family issues. It not only sets up a fresh story dynamic, but also seeds possibilities for more sequels, by having a future Batman waiting in the wings.

Take Batman Global

Speaking of Grant Morrison, before DC comics decided their continuity had become as tangled as Christmas lights caught in an airplane propeller and hit the ol' reset button on everything, Morrison started a "Batman" series that saw Bruce Wayne taking his fight against crime around the world. Batman Inc. had Gotham's guardian branch out across the globe, finding promising crime fighters to enlist as Wayne-funded protectors for their respective regions.

While Gotham has been the most important uncredited character in Nolan's films, it's taken quite a beating over the years, and increasing the scope of the "Batman" universe would help open new story opportunities. The Dark Knight already had Batman kidnapping an oily criminal accountant from China, so there's precedent for a Batman without borders. And last we see Bruce Wayne, he's out and about in the world, so who knows what new and exciting villains beyond the skyscrapers of Gotham need a good thumping from the original masked vigilante.

Review: Jack and Jill

Originally Posted November 12th, 2011 

It’s getting easier to believe that Adam Sandler has been orchestrating some Andy Kaufman-esque prank over the last few years. After America’s tepid response to his more dramatic roles in films like Funny People, perhaps Sandler decided that the best revenge was to give the people exactly what they want: shallow, inoffensive fast-food comedies like Grown Ups and Just Go With It, that, despite all evidence pointing towards their mostly meritless existence, still gross over $100 million. The hope was that these films would make his comeback as a dramatic actor all the more incredible but with Jack and Jill, the most reprehensibly lazy cash-grab yet to bare the Happy Madison name, what little dignity Sandler had left is publicly flayed, and it’s entirely his own fault.

Then again, you didn’t really need me to tell you that did you? The concept of a movie where Sandler plays his own twin sister is parody, maybe deserving of a five minute SNL sketch, yet here we are, with a 90 minute film all about Sandler dealing with his identical twin sister over the holidays. According to the filmmakers, twins are just the wackiest thing in the world, and you’d better think so to if you want to wring any enjoyment out of non-stop gags about twin powers, secret languages and Sandler mirroring himself on screen. No seriously, that’s the joke, there’s two of him and he’s doing the same thing, but one of him’s a lady!

And what a lady he is. Sandler’s been criticized for his over-reliance on characters with silly voices, but either he’s not listening, or just doesn’t care, because Jill is like the muse from which all those stupid voices and characters have originated. Oh sure, she’s loud, abrasive, and in all likelihood, mentally disturbed; that’s kinda the point of her as a catalyst for mayhem. She jumps from oblivious to shrill to psychotic and back again, often within the same scene, but when the filmmakers try to turn our disdain around on us to make you feel sorry for her, it’s insanity. Endearment in the writer’s eyes is Jill’s inability to remember movie titles correctly, and having a pet macaw named Poopsie. This is a repugnant, loathsome creation, devoid of any ounce of sympathy and one that I can only pray is too absurd for real life.

Granted, Jack and Jill’s version of L.A. seems overrun with gross comic characterizations that are often more frightening than funny. This is a world where someone almost gets the crap kicked out of him because he’s an atheist; not because he’s belittling the beliefs of others, no, just being atheist is grounds enough to be violently threatened. But hey, you book John McEnroe, you get him to yell at someone, because that’s still funny, right? Then there’s Sandler’s daughter, who creepishly carries around a doll dressed as herself through the entire film, which gets stranger and stranger the longer the movie goes without someone commenting on it. That’s not a character trait, it’s just weird, and Katie Holmes as Sandler’s wife is the closest thing to a sane voice in the film, though her refusal to acknowledge the utter nonsense around her probably makes her just as complicit in it.

Finally, there’s Jack, who should theoretically be the one identifiable person in this freak show, but is instead the most unlikeable everyman of Sandler’s increasing catalogue of lifeless family men. While having to exist in the same universe as Jill might be an excuse for frustration, it doesn’t explain why Sandler though it would be clever to play Jack as a raging, manipulative asshole, made abundantly clear through his cruelty to all those around him, particularly his employees. Oh by the way, he’s an ad exec, which might be a meta-commentary on the absurd amount of product placement in the film, but it'll probably just top-off your hatred for Jack as a human being.

Sandler just seems pissed off whenever he’s not in drag, which I think is coming from a very real place (no, not like that). Here we see Sandler looking at himself, or rather, the shtick-peddler he has become, and you can sense his frustration, with Jill embodying the kinds of sell-out characters he’s resorted to making as an appeal to a common denominator that couldn’t be any lower if it were subterranean. You just know that Sandler isn’t happy with this project, and worse, he knows that you know, hell, everyone seems acutely aware that this will be the career nadir for dozens.

It’s like watching a death row inmate relive his past crimes; you can sense his regret, but if he can’t forgive himself, why should we? And if this is Sandler’s execution, at least all his friends came by to observe it. The celebrity cameos are relentless, with usual suspects David Spade and Nick Swardson joined by pop culture throw-aways like Shamwow Guy and Subway’s Jared. But it’s not just the hacks Sandler roped in; Johnny Depp and Norm MacDonald are both palpably embarrassed in brief cameos, but at least the fleeting thrill of seeing them onscreen is a nice diversion. The big gun really is Al “Yes I have an Oscar” Pacino, in what’s probably his most fearless role in years. Playing himself offers up myriad easy jokes about his great roles of old, and he’s still woefully underserved by the script, but god love him for putting so much damn effort into this. It’d be easy to compare Pacino’s career spiral to Sandler’s, but at least here, Pacino dives into the material earnestly, almost sacrificially, in an effort to inject something, anything, resembling fun into this disaster.

Spoilers be damned, I can’t think of a better way to sum up my thoughts on Jack and Jill than to paraphrase the closing dialogue of Jack and Pacino as they watch their atrocious, quote-destroying Dunkin’ Donuts collaboration, an ad that is supposed to be the film’s big triumph:

Sandler: So what’d you think?

Pacino: Burn it. Destroy every copy. No one can ever know that this existed.

It’s not hard to figure out what Pacino and Sandler are actually talking about, the only question is whether this admission is more funny or pathetic. I’d side with the latter. There’s little about Jack and Jill that you could describe as funny.

1 out of 5

Directed by Dennis Dugan

2011, USA